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Topic: Is the Hop Calculator broken in BS 3? (Read 338 times)

Putting in a London brown ale recipe on BS3. Did this recipe before with Brewers Friend, and added 1.3 ounces total hops to reach an IBU of 16.21 for a 5 gallon batch. BS3 is telling me to use 13.7 ounces to reach 16 IBU. Seems that the figure in BS3 is off 10x. Anyone have this occur to them? Am I missing something obvious?

IBU calculators are pretty much consistent and follow one of the established models: Tinseth, Rager, Garetz. There may be something in your recipe or set up that is affecting the calculations. If you export the recipe from BeerSmith as a .bsmx file (highlight recipe > click on 'file' > 'export selected' and a save window will pop up). Attach the recipe to message on this thread and we can look at it and make recommendations. Also, if you link to the same recipe in Brewer's Friend we may be able to tell you the differences which may account for the change in IBU.

OK, in your equipment profile your elevation is listed as 32000 feet. The top of Mt Everest is 29029 ft. Given the altitude you have, the water will not reach a high enough temperature to isomerize much of the hops. When I set the altitude down to something reasonable, the IBU jump up to 181.1 (at 500 ft).

Reset this figure in your equipment profile and you should be all set.

There is a lesson here for software developers. The ability to set the altitude was billed as a new feature that gives users more flexibility. Of course it also gives users the flexibility to break the system with unreasonable inputs. There should be some checking to see if the value chosen is in a reasonable range.

I actually thought of that, but that would be a different scenario. The gravity would be zero, but they still keep the atmosphere pressurized. I don't know how high the pressure is on the ISS, but without gravity to cause bubbles to rise (or liquid to fall) a boiling liquid would be a very different thing than we are used to dealing with.